Caption: After ranking the iPhone 4 above all other cellphones, Consumer Reports decided the antenna problem it had originally failed to replicate in its testing facilities was serious enough to withdraw its recommendation.

Apple Duct-Tapes Over Consumer Reports Review

After ranking the iPhone 4 above all other cellphones, Consumer Reports decided the antenna problem it had originally failed to replicate in its testing facilities was serious enough to withdraw its recommendation, suggesting a strip of duct tape as a fix.

Apple appears to have shifted into full crisis mode over a problem with the iPhone 4 antenna that reduces reception and drops calls when the device is held in certain ways. The company has apparently deleted threads from its official message boards linking to a widely circulated Consumer Reports review of the phone in which the publication proposes fixing Apple’s most expensive cellphone with a strip of duct tape over the antenna on the lower left corner of the device.

Duct tape has a reputation for being able to solve nearly any problem. But one would expect a brand-new iPhone, which often comes with a two-year contract to AT&T, to work right out of the box — no duct tape required — which is why Apple’s apparent desire to paper over that latest Consumer Reportsarticle on its own website isn’t too surprising.

A reader on the The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) first pointed out that a number of threads mentioning the search term “consumer reports” had disappeared from discussions.apple.com, replaced by a note asking the user to log into the site, after which the relevant discussions still are not viewable. However, Microsoft’s Bing search engine cached those pages before Apple removed them, so they’re still visible for the curious.

According to TUAW’s Monday night article, “every post” in a Google search of the boards for the term “consumer reports” led to that error page.

Apple is apparently wising up about these deletions and allowing at least some discussion of this problem on its message boards, now that people have noticed the deletions, but it’s not the only organization trying to backpedal regarding this issue.

Consumer Reports also has egg on its face, having ranked the iPhone 4 as the best smartphone, then turned around to write that it “can’t recommend” the iPhone 4 due to the antenna issue.

When a publication can’t recommend what it calls the best smartphone in the world, it’s either trying to say something about the safety of radiation given off by smartphones in general, or it goofed, big time.

That doesn’t let Apple off the hook. Consumer Reports was willing to stake its reputation as a thorough reviews site on a contradiction of an earlier review. Besides, following a rash of early positive reviews, countless other tests have since echoed the publication’s most recent finding. A hardware problem exists with this phone — one that a software update cannot fix, much as Apple would like to pretend otherwise.

If only the company had thought to include a strip of duct tape in the first place, maybe this could have been avoided.